


Des Rêves et du Bonheur

by iberiandoctor (jehane)



Series: A State of Grace [2]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M, Middle Aged Virgins, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, New Year's Eve, Post-Seine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 20:32:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9141088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: In which Valjean makes an offer on New Year's Eve.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [groucha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/groucha/gifts).



> In _Remission,[Ch 10: The Effects of Dreams Mingled With Happiness](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6701155/chapters/16892382): On New Year's Eve, Valjean and Javert attended Marius and Cosette's festive celebration at the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire... They left the party early in a hansomcab, holding hands against the bitter cold. When they returned to l’Homme-Armé , the flat was so cold that the insides of the window frames were crusted with frost..._
> 
> ... Valjean's version of the events of New Year's Eve, 1833.

Jean Valjean had never had a reason to celebrate the passing of one year to the next, until now.

In Toulon, prisoners had been glad to see the back of the old year and of the suffering which they would never need to endure again. But the prospect of the new year in that forsaken place brought little joy, less hope, and a despair that cut a man's dreams from under him as soon as his eyes opened to the dawn. 

In Montreuil, after, Valjean had never dared harbour dreams of the future. There was relief that the suffering of the year was past, and resignation that the work of the next year still had to be done, and that was all. Madeleine's duties had obliged him to hold a reception for the eminent townsfolk to commemorate La Saint-Sylvestre, after which he would attend Mass: to give thanks for God's providence, to ask Him for strength to meet the burdens of the new year and for endurance to walk the many miles that would be required of him before he could rest at last.

In Petit-Picpus, time had stood still. He measured the turning of the years by the changing colours of the gardens and the rising height of Cosette's golden head; he had not dreaded the encroaching new year because the burdens he had then carried -- the hopes and dreams of his daughter -- had been light as air. He could have borne them in contentment forever, but he knew he needed to relinquish them eventually for Cosette's sake. And so, in time, they had left the sheltering walls of the convent and its modest Saint-Sylvestre celebrations, the sisters' voices lifted in song, in order to let his daughter's dreams take wing.

It had been a long road from Petit-Picpus to Cosette's new home at Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, to this shining room filled with well-dressed lawyers and professors and bankers, his fearless girl in all her finery at his side. This Révellion de la Saint-Sylvestre was a joyful celebration: étrennes and embraces were exchanged, and glasses charged to toast the advent of the new year. As the evening went on, Cosette would clasp his hand, and Marius would pause in conversation with a friend to smile at him, and gradually Valjean became aware of a curious lightness in his chest that he did not immediately recognise was happiness.

On his other side, he could see Javert trying not to roll his eyes. It had been a long road for them, too, from the banks of the greedy Seine, which had almost ended their journey before it could begin.

It had been then that Valjean had realised he could not simply lay down his burdens. He had known his crimes, had known he could not ask for more from life than one person's hopes; he had hoped that once Cosette's future had been secured, he could surrender himself to the authorities, where there would be a minimum of further suffering, and then, God willing, he would be allowed to rest.

He had never imagined that such carefully-planned surrender would be rejected by both God and Javert himself, that Valjean would instead be compelled to shoulder further responsibility -- in the person of that former Inspector, whose world had been destroyed seemingly by Valjean's own hand.

Valjean was not unaccustomed to assuming burdens in the face of another's need. In so doing, he discovered that the Almighty had His own plans for both Valjean and his reluctant charge.

The Valjean of a year ago would have barely believed it; the Valjean of two years ago would have hoped it was a temporary delusion brought on by decades of pursuit. But here Javert was, on the cusp of the new year that Valjean had never thought he would see, a constant presence at Valjean's side -- living in Cosette's old room at Rue de l'Homme Armé, and filling the corners of Valjean's apartment and Valjean's life with his irrepressible concerns, with his perennial caseload, with his improbable companionship and with something that went, even more improbably, beyond companionship.

Javert saw him looking. His lips moved, and out of long weeks of habit Valjean could now read the words he mouthed.

_Have mercy. It has been hours._

Valjean felt his own mouth curl upwards. He leaned over and murmured, "Are you quite well?"

Javert frowned, as if he was contemplating an equivocal response. Valjean watched with mild amusement. He had recently become aware that Javert had learned to deploy a white lie in service of the greater good; he was unsure if Javert would decide that his own boredom would be one such instance.

"There's no need for concern," Javert said, evidently deciding on truth for La Saint-Sylvestre. "I am merely unfamiliar with parties at which no crimes are being committed. Nor am I accustomed to having earnest young lawyers congratulate me on my work when they used to hasten from my presence."

"From your colleagues' accounts of your activities in the Bureau, you still make lawyers flee," Valjean assured him. He set aside the urge to clasp Javert's hand -- it would be most unseemly to do so in this public place. "It is not like you to wish to flee from them instead."

"It would be a strategic retreat," Javert said. "Besides, I am eager to continue with our reading; I believe we stopped last night at a rather interesting chapter." 

The ironic twist of his mouth made Valjean feel unaccountably warm. Over the last weeks he had found his gaze being increasingly drawn to Javert's mouth. They had lately been spending their evenings together at Rue de l'Homme Armé reading to each other from _Notre-Dame de Paris_. Valjean had immersed himself in the lushness of Javert's deep baritone, as much fascinated by the shapes Javert's lips made when they curved themselves around the words as by the words themselves.

"I am eager, too," Valjean confessed, and Javert's smile widened by a fraction. 

"Then you will accede to my request?"

"I find it increasingly difficult to deny you anything," Valjean said, entirely truthfully. 

He watched Javert's eyes darken in a way that he had seen more and more often over the last weeks. Here, under the bright lights of the Pontmercy ballroom, he thought he might finally understand what that look meant.

  
  
  
 

It was an extremely cold night. Snow covered the stones and lined the trees outside Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; the frigid darkness enveloped them like a blast from the Arctic itself. 

Javert shivered in his overcoat. Valjean knew his friend was prone to chills after his near-drowning in the Seine and his illness earlier that autumn. He knew better than to speak of it; instead he took Javert's gloved hands in his and assisted him into the fiacre. Once in the carriage, he put his arm around Javert in a bid to warm his friend with his own body's heat.

Javert settled against Valjean's shoulder, his tall form familiar after the many long evenings spent side by side on their couch before the fire. The weight of his friend under his arm was both comforting and discomfiting. Tonight there was a strange tension in Javert's shoulders and running through his long limbs, as indeed Valjean had begun to notice in their evenings together as they progressed through _Notre-Dame de Paris_. 

The carriage swayed as it rattled down the streets of the Marais district; Javert was pressed so closely against Valjean's chest that Valjean could feel the urgent thrum of his friend's heart through the thick layers of their clothing. 

Valjean did not need to look at Javert to know that the darkness had returned to his friend's gaze. Javert had worn that look the night they had fallen asleep before the fireplace and Valjean had awakened to unmistakable signs of his friend's arousal. 

It had also been the look that had accompanied Javert's confession that autumn morning at Rue des Vertus, with Valjean sitting by at his sick-bed. Javert had said, as though confessing to treason against Louis-Philippe himself, that he had belonged to Valjean as well as to God ever since he had been pulled from the Seine.

"When God opened my eyes, you were the first thing in this life that I beheld," he had said, swallowing, "and I have beheld it since that day." 

Javert had paused, his eyes holding misery and shame and something else that burned like a hot coal. "And I knew this to be my punishment for my many sins, that I would come to love the man I had wronged." 

Valjean could not then believe that Javert would consider being inflicted with love to be a punishment for sin. He did not however doubt that Javert did love him as he had so reluctantly confessed; had, in the moment that he held his friend's hands and kissed them, known that he himself shared that sentiment. 

"I do not deserve how good you are," Javert had said, and Valjean wondered if Javert understood that his feelings were returned.

It was most likely that Javert did understand. Would he have consented to live in Valjean's home, to willingly share Valjean's mornings and evenings and quiet life, if he did not?

The carriage righted itself and then Javert pulled abruptly away from Valjean. He stared out of the window, his face shuttered and still once again as if carved from granite. 

  
  
  
 

The fiacre finally pulled to a halt, the street of their abode too narrow to permit its passage. Javert leaped from it as if he had been burned, and Valjean finally thought he understood the changes in Javert's demeanour. He had after all seen evidence of Javert's bodily response to him that night before the fire. Javert was not yet an old man, and Valjean was aware that love often walked hand in hand with fleshly desire. For the first time, he understood that that desire was filling his friend with conflicted guilt.

Javert hurried ahead of Valjean up the stairs to their apartment. Valjean stared at his friend's ramrod-straight back and cast his mind over the events of the last months. On that autumn morning, Javert had told him that he would be ashamed to know what Javert's sin looked like; now Valjean realised his friend had been mortified by his body's arousal, and worse, he believed Valjean would be repulsed by evidence of Javert's desire. 

If that were true, Valjean had no idea how to resolve this impasse; he was not sure how to raise a matter of such intimacy with Javert. How could he, when he was not even sure how he himself felt about such matters? 

When they entered the apartment, the rooms were so cold that even the insides of the window frames were crusted with frost.

"Shall I light the fire?" Valjean asked; it had not been lit all day.

"Leave it," Javert said, suppressing a shiver. "We should just go straight to bed."

Valjean hastened to his own room as quickly as any fleeing defence lawyer in the face of the police, shed his coat and jacket, and performed his ablutions in water that held a faint sheen of ice.

Something had leaped up in his own body at Javert's mention of his bed. Was that the right of it? Did he also return Javert's feelings in this respect as well?

Valjean was well aware that this was one respect in which he was even less well versed than love. He knew that in Toulon men had turned to each other in relief and loneliness, but there no one had touched him save to hurt him, and in all those nineteen years he had only known the relief of his own hand. In Montreuil, wearing Madeleine's skin, he had been so careful; he could never have sought to alleviate his loneliness with romance. There had been many women who made no secret of their admiration for their attractive mayor, but he could scarcely have spent time with any of them without either misleading them or risking their uncovering his secrets. Of course, in the convent, it had been easy to remain free from all attachments, watching over Cosette as she grew, and he himself all too well aware of the watchful eyes of the nuns and of God. 

Matters were different with Javert, of course. For one, there was no question of misleading or risk: here was a man who had known every sin he, Valjean, had been guilty of and who seemed to esteem him despite it. 

For the other, he had come to know Javert more intimately than he had known any other. He had assumed responsibility for Javert's lengthy rehabilitation, endured the man's initial hostility and later interrogations, had seen to it that he attended Mass for the sake of his soul and sought to engage him in discussions regarding that soul. He used to pray for Javert, as well as to be delivered from Javert; he had found it was not a vastly different matter to pray _with_ Javert -- for God to work His divine mystery and bestow His grace upon the man's life.

And indeed that mercy and grace had found abundant soil in Javert's life. Javert had never done anything by halves -- he had hurled himself into his rehabilitation as vehemently as he had hurled himself into the Seine, had committed to his new moral code as relentlessly as he had committed himself to hunting down that infamous fugitive from justice. He had transformed his life under God by sheer force of will, and Valjean could not help feel proud of the reluctant penitent who had somehow become his only real friend.

Also, and this was truly the divine mystery of the Almighty: one might pray for another man, one might show him kindness in order that he might know a better path -- only to find that the man changed by one's prayers and good works was in truth one's own self. 

Walking at Javert's side, the way ahead formed from their footsteps, Valjean had found himself transformed: as gradually as water wearing away the river-bed, as quickly as a torrent of flame.

Cosette had been his whole world for such a long time; he had not thought his old heart could be quickened by love of another, had never thought he would find romantic attachment in the winter of his long life. He had certainly never believed his body could be stirred by the desire to consummate that attachment, to stoke the fire of that love until it brought respite to his lifetime of chastity.

Yet this appeared to be what was in fact occurring. Valjean's face was burning; again he sluiced it with freezing water in an attempt to cool his shameful ardour.

He stared into the sliver of reflective glass propped on the basin. His haunted eyes looked back at him.

"All love is a gift," he said aloud to himself. He did not know what he was supposed to do now.

He stripped off the rest of his clothes and garbed himself in his nightshirt. It was so cold that he put his coat back on. Then he took hold of his resolve and left his room in search of Javert's door.

  
  
  
 

When Valjean entered Javert's bedroom Javert had wrapped his bedspread around his shoulders. His face looked haggard with cold. They knelt on floorboards which sent the chill straight up their bodies.

For the first time in his life, Valjean could not find the words to petition God's aid for his troubles. The familiarity of the paternoster brought him scant relief. He could feel Javert's body at his side, shivering slightly and filled with abundant life, and he found he could think of nothing else. 

When their recited prayers were at an end, Valjean clambered to his feet as stiffly as a statue which had just come alive. He found he could not look at his friend. He did not know what he intended to say.

"Do you think we might ... pass the night together, given how cold it is?"

His words came as much as a shock to him as to Javert. The blood seemed to drain from Javert's face. He, too, got slowly to his feet; his mouth opened and shut but no sounds issued forth.

Over the loudness of his own blood in his ears, under the concealing fabric of his overcoat, Valjean became aware that his body had roused itself for the first time in years, overcome with his uncharacteristic boldness and yet more uncharacteristic longing.

He found he could not speak. He stood as if frozen to the floor, rigid and trembling under his clothes from something that was not cold.

Javert stretched out a hand. It took a long moment before Valjean realised his friend meant not to touch him, but to ward him off.

"Best not to, Jean," he said, his voice unsteady, his chest heaving with quick, uneven breath. "You are too good for me; you would not understand what I am capable of. You have never been touched — you would not know that you cannot trust me to pass the night with you in the same bed."

Valjean did not know what to say to this. All the blood presently elsewhere in his body seemed to be making him stupid with desire. Dimly, he became aware that the bedspread had fallen from Javert's shoulders, revealing that Javert, also, was unmistakably aroused.

"Good night," Javert said. When Valjean found himself unable to move, Javert grasped his shoulders in those big hands and hastened him, not ungently, through the door. 

That door was then firmly closed behind him. 

Valjean took one step away out of habit, and then he hesitated.

His ears ringing, his heart pounding obdurately, he found himself addressing Javert through the door.

"You may be right; I may not understand. I have never known what it was like to have a companion, and it is true that I have known no loving touch."

Valjean paused. His skin seemed to prickle all over with heat. “But this does not mean I do not seek to understand, or desire to be touched. Perhaps God has placed you in my life so that I can finally learn about this kind of love.”

He did not wait for Javert's response. He turned and blindly made his way to his own bed.

  
  
  
 

The sheets of his bed were like sheets of ice; the rough blanket atop them doing little to cut through the chill. Valjean twisted and turned, unable to get warm, uncomfortably aware of the jut of his erection at the fork of his thighs, rubbing against sheets and tangled cloth with every shift in position. 

Reciting the prayers of penitence and once again the paternoster did nothing to alleviate his condition. His body had finally wakened despite itself and he was miserable with wanting. 

When it seemed nothing else would quiet him, he crammed his hand under his nightshirt and took hold of his aching flesh.

It was so different from touching himself in Toulon, in Montreuil, on rare occasions in Petit-Picpus. Solitary and alone, he had then forced himself to think of no one, to picture no other hand save his own, performing a simple, mechanical bodily function that brought him temporary relief.

Now, his thoughts were filled with Javert: a man transformed by a miraculous rescue, by _Notre-Dame de Paris_ , by improbable love. A man whom Valjean had known for more than half his life, as familiar as the sound of his own footfalls, as his beating heart. 

Valjean could not help but imagine Javert beside him in the bed, every inch of him known and beloved, from the frown of concentration in his eyes to the set of his lantern jaw, to the slant of his long body in the moonlight. 

It was not his own hand that grasped him, but Javert's, the back of it covered in coarse hair, the large palm rough from years of use, stroking him slowly and relentlessly from the base of his manhood to its swollen head. 

"I too have never been touched," this Javert murmured as Valjean gasped in pleasure. "But I wish to show you what I am capable of."

Valjean closed his eyes, overcome by a need which he had for so long denied himself. "Teach me," he muttered, spreading his thighs for Javert's eager caresses.

Javert said, "Let us both teach the other," and his thumb slid wantonly over the slick crown of Valjean's prick; Valjean could not help the groan he made as he released in a hot blaze.

He was not used to experiencing such bodily bliss, or the feeling of satiation that followed. For a long time he lay on the wrecked sheets, exhausted by his completion. It seemed almost greedy to wish for anything more than what he had just experienced: a waking dream of his friend in his bed, touching him and giving him pleasure. 

Yet he could not help but indeed desire more -- to wish for not just a dream, but the real man himself, unmistakable and irrepressible and the only person whom Valjean had ever so desired.

Valjean could only wonder at how he had been changed, like stones on a river-bed, like a torrent of flame. He could not help but believe that Javert would one day come to understand, that Javert would put aside the guilt that still held him fast and allow himself to approach Valjean in gladness and touch him without fear.

From far away, through the thinness of the walls, Valjean fancied he could hear the sound of church bells as they struck midnight, heralding the new year. For the first time he could remember, Valjean felt hope steal over him; for the first time in so many years, he dared consider a future that might, after all, bring with it unexpected happiness.

**Author's Note:**

> Extremely speedy beta by esteven!


End file.
